Is there a silver lining to the conflict that has dogged North Carolina's largest public school system? Maybe in this sense: Lots of people in Wake County are paying attention to issues that in calmer times would scarcely show up on their personal radar screens.
There has been a huge debate over fundamental questions of opportunity and quality. The Wake school system's strong points and weak points have been weighed, measured and dissected.
Let's be generous and stipulate that all contenders in the debate want the best for the students who arrive at Wake schoolhouses for their assigned doses of instruction intermixed with socializing, sports, music-making, what have you.
Whose approach - to deciding where students will go to school, what paths they'll be placed on, what kind of support and attention they'll get - is likely to do the most to help them succeed?
This much seems pretty obvious, as it must have to many recent voters: Sink or swim may be an effective way of getting people to do the dog paddle, but in the public schools letting some children sink shouldn't be an option. Some will face disadvantages that they simply can't be expected to overcome without being thrown a lifeline.
This point comes in the context of the far-from-settled issue of student assignment, and whether an assignment plan that channels kids into schools near where they live can reliably do right by them.
The Wake school board has before it a plan that lets parents choose schools. But the array of choices is controlled by the central office.
The concern of many, including board members who are poised to claim a majority on the strength of Kevin Hill's runoff re-election win last week, has been that some schools in poorer areas would not give students the kind of boost they'd get in areas where most families were better off. Classrooms and courses would be full of kids who had fallen behind the education curve early on and struggled to make up ground.
Some teachers, dedicated souls that they are, would adapt perfectly well. They find their life's calling in working with students who face the highest obstacles. Others may be only too satisfied to just pass kids along, staggering under the burden of low expectations.
And some students, even those with the deck stacked against them, have the inbred grit to rise to any challenge, perhaps with the support of parents who yearn for their children to savor more of life's possibilities. Others give in to short-term pleasures, resentment and despair. Their parents fail to help because they can't or won't.
The Wake system's antidote used to be its diversity policy, which sought to keep economically (and often educationally) disadvantaged kids from being packed into certain schools. That policy - rooted in racial integration and efforts to eradicate any vestiges of separate and unequal - is history, scrapped by a board that responded to a range of parental grievances and that made diversity a useful scapegoat.
Superintendent Tony Tata's choice-based assignment plan is supposed to give students who might be otherwise be locked into a school with a mediocre academic record a chance for an upgrade.
How that will work in practice is hard to tell - the big reason that Kevin Hill voted last month to hold off on the plan until the matter could be addressed. But any assignment model that allows high-poverty, low-achievement schools to develop would betray the principles on which these board members campaigned and do a huge disservice to thousands of students and families.
Critics of the old policy argued that sending some students out of their lower-income neighborhoods did more harm than good in the form of time-consuming bus rides and by making it harder for parents to stay in the loop.
No one can say that a school system in which only a little more than half of students from poor families manage to graduate has found the magic formula for overcoming the link between poverty and low achievement.
But a fair number of Wake's schools already have slipped into the high-poverty category as close adherence to diversity guidelines in such a large and fast-growing system proved unworkable. So it's hard to blame the policy when some students haven't done well.
Then there's this show-stopper: Making up for high-poverty schools' disadvantages, to the extent that's possible, costs money. Where's that money coming from, in a county that long has kept its schools on relatively skimpy rations? Don't look to the budget-bedeviled state, that's for sure.
The debate over student assignment has touched on a deeper set of issues at the heart of public education: How can schools maximize the prospects of each and every student? Are sound policies and ample resources the key to success or does success hinge on the motivation and self-responsibility of students and parents? Yes, and yes. As for the new school board, it must fully own up to the system's past shortcomings and be relentless in pushing toward new heights for all.
